Cutting off your post to spite your blog

Unless you’re a site that needs page views to sell ads, excerpting your RSS feed rather than publishing the full post is very poor blog etiquette.

After six years and with over 15,000 posts (and more than two million words), I guess I can claim some sort of senior status as a blogger. And I just don’t read blog posts that aren’t published in full in the RSS feeds. Too much trouble. I am not alone.

I make exceptions for people like Krugman. If you get a Nobel Prize I’ll make an exception for you.

But until then, please fix your RSS feed if it truncates.

10 thoughts on “Cutting off your post to spite your blog”

  1. I tried to use an RSS reader, but found I disliked it. I prefer to see the personality of the blog rather than the boring RSS interface.

    And since I have ads on my site, I find the opposite: It’s good blog courtesy to read something on a blog that will increase revenue (by a cent or two) for someone who’s gone to the trouble of writing something I enjoyed reading.

    And if I really liked the article, I’ll click on their ads, just to earn them a few cents more.

    That’s how I define blog etiquette.

  2. You’re a crabby old man. I can understand why people check your ID to buy beer. They just want to piss you off. Me too.

  3. I honestly don’t know what my feed looks like. It’s set to the Squarespace default.

    I don’t use an RSS reader, so I’ve never checked …

  4. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Tom’s right, I’m just a crab. Tom, Karen, Elise — your feeds are just fine. So is KathyF’s. There is a highly regarded blogger here in ABQ that is guilty and some others. Slate is a big culprit. And the NYTimes.

    But it was mostly just a tired old guy ranting because my left leg hurt from all the clutch work in the new car. 🙂

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